I’m not very good at directions. There, I said it. Yes, I sometimes get turned around in areas that I don’t know. So I’m usually a little hesitant when I start running in a city I don’t know very well. That was the case this weekend when I headed out for a run in Ashland Ohio. I was visiting my son at AU but wanted to get my Saturday run in so I decided to just start exploring. I knew the general layout of the town but certainly did not know street names or distances. Normally I’m fine as long as streets are straight and crossroads run perpendicular. But when streets angle or curve I’m in trouble. I headed through downtown Ashland and I was fine for the first couple of turns but then the road started to curve and I was in a residential neighborhood with curves and cul-de-sacs. I wanted to run about an hour-fifteen so I just sort of worked my way in the general direction I thought I wanted to go. There were a few times I wasn’t sure I was headed in the right direction but then I’d come to a cross street that looked familiar so I kept going. As it turns out I got back to the hotel about fifteen minutes sooner than I wanted so I headed the other direction to a main intersection and did a large block on straight streets. In the end it was a good run and I saw much of Ashland that I had not explored before.

Then came the hard part when I tried to recreate the route on my online log at www.runnersworld.com. But I figured it out and learned that I had done not quite 8 miles on my adventure. Just what I wanted.